Home

Explore content from blog posts to technical white papers gathered together for your convenience. All written by Altium's community of PCB design experts.

How to Navigate the Perils of PCB Design Review ​ Whether you’re a first-time designer or a hardened veteran, the integrity of your designs relies heavily on inspecting a product for design errors before production. What can be done to identify design flaws while staying productive? Before a new design is sent into production, it's critical to put the design through a PCB design review so that design errors can be identified before manufacturing. In many cases, a design will pass rules checks Read Article
Sync Your Electronics Inventory Management System With the Cloud Do you use internal databases and tracking tools for electronics inventory management? Sync your inventory management system with the cloud. Read Article
Detroit Become Human Cosplay with Flexible PCBs and CircuitPython A Father’s Story for “Introduce A Girl To STEM Day” Read Article
Working with Customer PCB Fabrication Data Through the Cloud Manufacturing won’t begin until you can receive and inspect PCB fabrication data from customers. Here’s how Altium 365 helps by bringing design and fab data into Altium Designer. Read Article
Looking Forward: 2021 Industry Trends and Events to Watch for Where are we going in these crazy times? Mike Buetow shares with us what to look out for, the current trends, and what will help you be a better design engineer in 2021. Read Article
Remotely Powering Devices, Wirelessly With electronic devices being available in smaller and smaller sizes and the prevalence of wi-fi networks, the rise of remote monitoring devices around the home and the workplace continues to grow. Smart heating solutions now place sensors in every room, monitoring everything from temperature to occupancy to provide a highly efficient zonal heating system. Intruder detection systems no longer require thousands of meters of wiring to be installed Read Article
Guidelines for Creating Useful Schematic Symbols The schematic symbols that you use to represent the components are at the heart of your schematic design. The quality of the symbol and how it is arranged can be one of the most critical factors influencing your schematic’s readability. A poor quality schematic symbol will lead to an unreadable schematic sheet that is difficult to understand. I created the largest open-source library for Altium Designer over five years ago, initially as a way to Read Article
Using a Thermal Camera for PCB Diagnostics There has likely been a time when you’ve powered on a freshly built prototype for the first time, only to find you’ve hit the current limit on the lab power supply. Even as you increase the current limit to way beyond what you would expect your board to draw, the lab power supply is still limited. If it’s safe, you poke around the board with your finger, but you can’t feel any parts that are hot to the touch. Also, probing around with a Read Article
What does AMD’s purchase of Xilinx mean for the electronics world? Who is Xilinx? While AMD is focused on microprocessor production, Xilinx is a specialist producer of FPGA (field-programmable gate arrays), which are particularly useful for telecommunications applications, and the development of 5G across the world has opened up significant growth in this sector. The expected number of new 5G cellular base stations required over the next five to ten years will be in the millions. Xilinx has been one of the front Read Article
IPC-2551 Digital Twin Standard Released Read our brief on the new IPC-2551 standard and how digital twins might be used in the PCB industry. Read Article
S-Parameter Measurements and Errors in Power Integrity No matter where you look, it seems S-parameters never go away! They are mandatory tools for understanding some systems, such as an interconnect or antenna, while other network parameters can sometimes give a better conceptual understanding of electrical behavior. These parameters are normally reserved for signal integrity among electronics engineers, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find that S-parameters are also used for power integrity Read Article
Create a High Current Buck Voltage Controller Mark Harris continues a deep dive into high current buck converter design with off-the-shelf components. We include component choice and PCB layout plus all the calculations and guidelines. Read Article
Smart Micro Fan Controller If you’ve ever had to wear eye protection for an extended period of time, especially if you have prescription inserts in that eye protection, you’ve probably noticed fogging can be a major issue. Last year I designed and 3D printed a small fan unit that mounts a 25mm x 25mm x 10mm fan on each side of a military eye protection. It directs a small flow of air over the inside of the lenses and keeps them clear even during physical exertion on cool Read Article
Complete Guide to PCB Design Reuse in the Cloud Isaac Newton once said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." Not all designs need to be remade from scratch, and if you organize your designs properly you can easily reuse your old design data in a new project. PCB design reuse practices are great for cutting down design time and ensuring all your products live up to the same level of quality. It’s all about making sure the knowledge you’ve gained from building Read Article
Create a Buck-Boost Power Supply In this series of articles, we’re looking at the design and implementation of the main types of power regulators and converters you might use in an electronics project. I gave a graduate engineer who I mentor a series of requirements to demonstrate each of these types and have recorded the results here so you can work through the same exercises and hopefully come up with the same results. The next switching regulator is the last in our switching Read Article
How to Design a Boost Voltage Regulator In this series of articles, we’re looking at the design and implementation of the main types of power regulators and converters you might use in an electronics project. I gave a graduate engineer who I mentor a series of requirements to demonstrate each of these types and have recorded the results here so you can work through the same exercises and hopefully come up with the same results. For the next switching power supply project from my Read Article
Build an Advanced Brushless Motor Controller In this project article, we’re going to be taking a different approach to my typical project. Driving a brushless motor is relatively simple from a schematic perspective; however, there is a large amount of theory about brushless direct current motors that you need to understand to be successful. If you only have experience with brushed motors or no experience with driving motors at all, we will be covering everything you need to know. You can Read Article